An Inconvient Truth

Has anybody gone to see the movie? What did you think about it? I thought it was an excellent movie of persuasion, although some of the facts seemed wrong to me, and there were a few disappointments with the movie.

The movie starts off with non sequitorish behaviour. At 57 s, he shows a picture of the Apollo 8 mission to the moon. At 2:37 he shows calving glaciers, then pollution, and a from-space picture of Hurricane Katrinia

I'll admit the first disappointment was most hardhitting. I don't know what I was thinking. After the introduction, the first thing he said was "I am not going to spend much time on the science of it." Did I expect otherwise? I guess I did because my mouth dropped open. Of course then he went into a little animation explaining the greenhouse effect. It showed sunlight going in then leaving—without the greenhouse effect. Then, with the greenhouse effect—sunlight going in, and bouncing off of the ground, but most of it reflecting off of the atmosphere back to the ground. Interestingly, he showed a little cartoon to appeal to other audiences that broke down the situation well.

First a little girl's ice cream cone melts suddenly and she starts to cry. A man comes over (I believe modeled after the one from The Twilight Zone). Little Suzie (or whatever her name as) asks him why her ice cream melted. "Global Warming!!" The cartoon goes on for a few minutes showing greenhouse effect in a completely unbiased way.

Light comes from the sun. The light is illustrated by a chipper, self-confident piece of fire/light that is in the form of a person. He is walking to the Earth through space with a huge grin on his face. However "nasty greenhouse gases" are portrayed as green blobules like amoebas, and are thugs. When the innocent ray of light gets to the Earth, he gets the **** beat out of him by a few greenhouse gases, his money is stolen, and the sunlight lays on top of the Earth, dead. More and more sunlight comes, the greenhouse gases mug all of them, until the entire Earth is covered in their stinking, rotting, dead corpses. "Their rotting corpses heat the Earth."

Secondly of disappointments, I was surprised to find that a lot of the movie was about him. That's right, about him, not AGW. I guess its his movie and he can do whatever he wants with it.

There was a pretty cool graph that was a hybrid of The Hockeystick (http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/USAToday060602.jpg [Broken]), and http://www.mwnx.net/users/mac/Climatology/temp%20and%20CO2%20since%20400,000%20vostokjpg.jpg [Broken], quite obviously correlating temperature and CO2 using Vostok ice core data with timespan 0-400,000 yrs (he may have used a 650,000 yr. one, I'm not sure). One of the climaxes of the movie was when he got on some kind of elevator to show the CO2 hockeystick at its current time. Then, following a linear regression, the projected CO2 goes up and up and up off the chart way above where the temperature is.

At 46 min and 2 seconds, he talks about polar bears drowning, with a helpful illustration of a polar bear working very well entirely on pathos.

Throughout the fall and especially just before freeze-up of the bay, increasing numbers of bears move towards the coast.

http://biology.usgs.gov/s+t/noframe/s034.htm [Broken]

Numbers of bears captured per unit of effort, in the Beaufort Sea, also have increased, providing another indication of population growth. The few catch/effort data from the Chukchi Sea also suggest an increasing trend

http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/pr...y/LC20050525043 [Broken]

More recent studies have found a 20 to 25 per cent increase in polar bear numbers across Canada.

t's not that nothing has been done:

http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/bear-facts/ [Broken]

Polar bears are a potentialy threatened (not endangered) species living in the circumpolar north. They are animals which know no boundaries. They pad across the ice from Russia to Alaska, from Canada to Greenland and onto Norway's Svalbard archipelago. No adequate census exists on which to base a worldwide population estimate, but biologists use a working figure of perhaps 22,000 to 25,000 bears with about sixty percent of those living in Canada.

In most sections of the Arctic where estimates are available, polar bear populations are thought to be stable at present. Counts have been decreasing in Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait, where about 3,600 bears are thought to live, but are increasing in the Beaufort Sea, where there are around 3,000 bears.

In the 1960s and 1970s, polar bears were under such severe survival pressure that a landmark international accord was reached, despite the tensions and suspicions of the Cold War. The International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears was signed in Oslo, November 15, 1973 by the five nations with polar bear populations (Canada, Denmark which governed Greenland at that time, Norway, the U.S., and the former U.S.S.R.).

The polar bear nations agreed to prohibit random, unregulated sport hunting of polar bears and to outlaw hunting the bears from aircraft and icebreakers as had been common practice. The agreement also obliges each nation to protect polar bear denning areas and migration patterns and to conduct research relating to the conservation and management of polar bears. Finally, the nations must share their polar bear research findings with each other. Member scientists of the Polar Bear Specialist Group meet every three to four years under the auspices of the IUCN World Conservation Union to coordinate their research on polar bears throughout the Arctic.

With the agreement in force, polar bear populations slowly recovered. The Oslo agreement is one of the first and most successful international conservation measures enacted in the 21st century.

[...]

I show that Polar Bears, which, incidentely, survived the early Holocene Thermal maximum (Hypsithermal) and the Medieval Warming Period, are thriving, increasing their numbers considerably, yet people continue to let them go extinct?

Immediately after this Al Gore explains how fresh meltwater from the last ice age caused floods in the North Atlantic that caused thermohaline circulation to completely shut down. My immediate reaction to this is to think "no freaking way," but I have not read anything about this.

He showed a graph concerning biodiversity that was pretty interesting. At a southern Switzerland station he graphed the amount of frost days going back some years, and superimposed the amount of invasive species coming into Switzerland. The correlation was astonishing.

It basically looked like this:

Code (Text):

Frost days
_________
\ /
/\
________/ \
Species

He started talking about his enemies, the anti-global warmers. All I remember are some quotes I wrote down.

"There is a consensus of global warming."

"[Skeptics'] objective is to reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact."

"This is a moral issue."
Can't we just stick with science? "http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/fear_main.shtml [Broken]! Carl Sagan wrote that we should get out of "the demon-haunted world" of our past.

Here are three other things he said that might start a conversation.
"Soil evaporation increases dramatically with temperature."
"Species lost is going up over 1000x faster than current rate."
"Scientists could predict precisely how much water would break through the levees in New Orleans"

Recommendations For Global Warming Skeptics, an armchair analysis
by Andre

Apparently, one of the instincts for survival of a social species like Homo sapiens is social group building. Consequently the function of that group is survival against any threat, ultimately improving the quality of life. It appears that cause and effect are interchangeable. If there is a threat, the group bonds will strengthen to counter it. If there is no threat, the group tends to loose coherence and this is undesirable, as it opposes to the social instinct. But this problem can be countered by finding a new threat or create one if required.

Most often, threats emerge from the same species. This mechanism can be observed in primary schools already. Pestering individual children is more often the work of a group, the main culprits usually being those who desire the leadership of the gang, eager to show that they are well prepared for that job. The victim is the threat, the enemy that justifies the forming and reinforcing of the group. At adulthood the principle doesn't change, only the scale. The threats are now the Huns, the Barbarians, the Capitalists, the Commies, the Heathens, the other religion, etc. Threats can also be non-human: hurricanes, meteorite impact, flooding, etc, or even abstract: dragons, devils, global warming, etc. It may even be possible to capture this effect in a numerical expression (soon to be known as Andre's law of conservation of concern)

Studying past and present civilisations can be used to test this hypothesis. Assuming that Tn, Cc and N are constant, then the sum of Th and Ta should be constant as well. In other words, the safest, most unchallenged communities from human threats should have the most dangerous devils and dragons.

Now, as the relatively safe modem western civilization suffered a severe loss of human threat (Th) with the demise of Communism, it sought compensation in increasing abstract threat (Ta). For identifying that new emerging Ta-threat we only need to synchronize possible candidates with the weakening of the Th-threat. As the credibility of a possible devil and dragons threat has declined considerably, obviously Global Warming remaines as possible candidate to take over the threat role of communism in the early 1990ies. And we see that the timing is exactly right. And with every former communists country, joining western organizations, the threat of global warming increases proportionally. Before that period, it did lead a meager existence, fighting the new ice age that was coming. Now, the impact of global warming on society equals the burden of the previous communist threat.

As observed on the schoolyards, those who have the highest desire for the acceptance, approval, love, and ultimately the leadership of the group, show this by brave, heroic behavior against the threat. If the threat is human, the ultimate consequences of seeking dominance of the group this way, can be disastrous, and initial enemy image building, "Capitalists", "Commies", etc, accumulates into revolutions, wars and massacres. How about non-human threats and abstract threats? How about the global warming?

Obviously, those who seek a higher social status can do so by showing the determination to fight any threat of the group and become heroes. But it doesn't work if the society is either not aware or not convinced of that particular threat. So the "enemy image" must be build first and an insistent information campaign is required with a deluge of alleged evidence of Global warming. This is easy since there are many shrewd prospective heroes, well capable of making a case. One cannot help comparing this tendency with similar information campaigns against threats in the past (a.k.a. propaganda), the human enemy image building, which ultimately ended in tragedies. But this actually explains also, how social group mechanisms ultimately lead to such tragedies. Well, in the case of global warming, an imaginary abstract threat (Ta) cannot suffer; only their fierce, heroic fighters and their followers could, albeit a lot less compared to the tragedies resulting from creating a human threat image (Th).

So what is the lesson of this little observation exercise from an armchair for the skeptics of global warming? Being right and being wise is not the same. Perhaps its better to leave the Global Warming alarmists alone and not to expose the non-existence of the threat. The ultimate outcome of falsifying Global Warming could be opposite the desired result.

First of all, as already experienced, deniers of threats must be traitors per definition, who will be banished from the group, marked with tar and feathers. Secondly, social groups required threats as a constant factor. It’s a human requirement; we do not like to lose our dearly beloved enemies. An abstract threat image like global warming is a lot less dangerous than a creating or intensifying another human enemy image. So when the alleged global warming threat is taken away, the focus may shift again to assumed human threats, consequently risking the development of more conflict tragedies. The global warming dragon devil may even replace the enemy image that other civilizations have about the west and thus helping to prevent future human tragedies. This outweighs the importance of the truth

Global warmers are to be commended for their selection of a harmless enemy. Hurray for global warming.

Would that explain some of http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page6333.asp [Broken]

...Let me turn now to the evidence itself. The scientific evidence of global warming and climate change: UK leadership in environmental science...

I said earlier it needed global leadership to tackle the issue. But we cannot aspire to such leadership unless we are seen to be following our own advice...

Tackling climate change will take leadership, dynamism and commitment - qualities that I know are abundantly represented in this room...

To acquire global leadership, on this issue Britain must demonstrate it first at home.

Perhaps that that little armchair analyses wasn't that bad in the first place. Would it also explain "An unconvenient truth"? a master piece of demagoguery.

Has anybody gone to see the movie? What did you think about it? I thought it was an excellent movie of persuasion, although some of the facts seemed wrong to me, and there were a few disappointments with the movie.

The movie starts off with non sequitorish behaviour. At 57 s, he shows a picture of the Apollo 8 mission to the moon. At 2:37 he shows calving glaciers, then pollution, and a from-space picture of Hurricane Katrinia

I'll admit the first disappointment was most hardhitting. I don't know what I was thinking. After the introduction, the first thing he said was "I am not going to spend much time on the science of it." Did I expect otherwise? I guess I did because my mouth dropped open. Of course then he went into a little animation explaining the greenhouse effect. It showed sunlight going in then leaving—without the greenhouse effect. Then, with the greenhouse effect—sunlight going in, and bouncing off of the ground, but most of it reflecting off of the atmosphere back to the ground. Interestingly, he showed a little cartoon to appeal to other audiences that broke down the situation well.

First a little girl's ice cream cone melts suddenly and she starts to cry. A man comes over (I believe modeled after the one from The Twilight Zone). Little Suzie (or whatever her name as) asks him why her ice cream melted. "Global Warming!!" The cartoon goes on for a few minutes showing greenhouse effect in a completely unbiased way.

Light comes from the sun. The light is illustrated by a chipper, self-confident piece of fire/light that is in the form of a person. He is walking to the Earth through space with a huge grin on his face. However "nasty greenhouse gases" are portrayed as green blobules like amoebas, and are thugs. When the innocent ray of light gets to the Earth, he gets the **** beat out of him by a few greenhouse gases, his money is stolen, and the sunlight lays on top of the Earth, dead. More and more sunlight comes, the greenhouse gases mug all of them, until the entire Earth is covered in their stinking, rotting, dead corpses. "Their rotting corpses heat the Earth."

Secondly of disappointments, I was surprised to find that a lot of the movie was about him. That's right, about him, not AGW. I guess its his movie and he can do whatever he wants with it.

There was a pretty cool graph that was a hybrid of The Hockeystick (a staple), and http://www.mwnx.net/users/mac/Climatology/temp%20and%20CO2%20since%20400,000%20vostokjpg.jpg [Broken], quite obviously correlating temperature and CO2 using Vostok ice core data with timespan 0-400,000,000 yrs (he may have used a 650,000,000 yr. one, I'm not sure). One of the climaxes of the movie was when he got on some kind of elevator to show the CO2 hockeystick at its current time. Then, following a linear regression, the projected CO2 goes up and up and up off the chart way above where the temperature is.

At 46 min and 2 seconds, he talks about polar bears drowning, with a helpful illustration of a polar bear working very well entirely on pathos.

Immediately after this Al Gore explains how fresh meltwater from the last ice age caused floods in the North Atlantic that caused thermohaline circulation to completely shut down. My immediate reaction to this is to think "no freaking way," but I have not read anything about this.

He showed a graph concerning biodiversity that was pretty interesting. At a southern Switzerland station he graphed the amount of frost days going back some years, and superimposed the amount of invasive species coming into Switzerland. The correlation was astonishing.

It basically looked like this:

Code (Text):

Frost days
_________
\ /
/\
________/ \
Species

He started talking about his enemies, the anti-global warmers. All I remember are some quotes I wrote down.

"There is a consensus of global warming."

"[Skeptics'] objective is to reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact."

"This is a moral issue."
Can't we just stick with science? "http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/fear_main.shtml [Broken]! Carl Sagan wrote that we should get out of "the demon-haunted world" of our past.

Here are three other things he said that might start a conversation.
"Soil evaporation increases dramatically with temperature."
"Species lost is going up over 1000x faster than current rate."
"Scientists could predict precisely how much water would break through the levees in New Orleans"

I'll have to make time to see this film. The best this sort of hype can do is reduce dependency on oil and promote an awareness of the global environment. In my opinion whatever changes are taking place are diffucult to reverse. Like trying to correct orbital precession or something just as enormous.

The worst a film like that can do is freak out a bunch of kids and adults. If kids aren't being alarmed about "global warming" and its implications, real or imagined, there have been lots of wars, diseases, bombs and empty causes to choose from recently.

There are always lots of wars, disease, bombs, and empty causes to choose from to be scared of.

Those who seek a higher social status can do so by showing the determination to fight any threat of the group and become heroes. But it doesn't work if the society is either not aware or not convinced of that particular threat. So the "enemy image" must be build first and an insistent information campaign is required with a deluge of alleged evidence of Global warming. This is easy since there are many shrewd prospective heroes, well capable of making a case.

Once I asked how can somebody hate the United States President? He doesn't do anything. Of course he does, for instance he controls the military.. but only 325,000 of them. He vetos bills.. but they can be overridden. He chooses the Supreme Court Justices if any leave office, but usually less than one per President, and any decision on a justice can be overridden by the legislature. It took Nixon three tries before he got Harry Blackmun. Probably the President's strongest power is his power of persuasion. If he wants to say something, people are going to listen to him, and they are going to talk about it. If there is a threat, real or imagined, human, non-human, or abstract, people are going to listen to him and talk about it. The US President, as the highest and most respected person (unless you are blinded by hate) in the entire country, he tells the populus what to choose from. Whether it be wars, diseases, bombs, or empty causes. Iraq, and Afghanastan, AIDS in Africa, Iran's nuclear missiles, or immigration.

There are always lots of wars, disease, bombs, and empty causes to choose from to be scared of.

Once I asked how can somebody hate the United States President? He doesn't do anything. Of course he does, for instance he controls the military.. but only 325,000 of them. He vetos bills.. but they can be overridden. He chooses the Supreme Court Justices if any leave office, but usually less than one per President, and any decision on a justice can be overridden by the legislature. Probably the President's strongest power is his power of persuasion. If he wants to say something, people are going to listen to him, and they are going to talk about it. If there is a threat, real or imagined, human, non-human, or abstract, people are going to listen to him and talk about it. The US President, as the highest and most respected person (unless you are blinded by hate) in the entire country, he tells the populus what to choose from. Whether it be wars, diseases, bombs, or empty causes. Iraq, and Afghanastan, AIDS in Africa, Iran's nuclear missiles, or immigration.

Please don't mistake frustration for hate. I have not singled out any one head of state, or any single person for that matter, by highlighting the over emphasis on "global warming", disease, bombs and wars that has been capitalized upon by the media. Further to that I tend to hold every adult, woman or man, on the planet responsible for allowing (and promoting) a legacy of land mines, invasions, polluted environments, hatred and empty causes to be left as our heritage for the generations to come. It is you, actually, who immediately concluded that your president was the focus of my frustration and who immediately transformed that frustration into hatred for an influential person that you and I really don't know from Adam.

There are many articles that pick apart Gore's "factual" claims in "Inconvenient Truths." Undoubtedly, at least some of these issues can be debated until the next ice age raises its frosty head. However, in my view Gore tiptoes past the key question.

Assuming that warming is a reality, what percentage of the change is due to human forcings? What model should one use to zero in on this question given the fact that predictions from the many existing models look like buckshot. Gore does not attempt to address this question and simply states that the driving force is due to two-legged creatures.

There is a rumor floating around in the best of circles that climate does change. Perhaps in his next movie Gore will tell us how much of the change is due to human activities and how much is natural based on the excellent models that will have been developed by that time.

Gore does not attempt to address this question and simply states that the driving force is due to two-legged creatures.

I think he said "bird" one or two times.

There is a rumor floating around in the best of circles that climate does change. Perhaps in his next movie Gore will tell us how much of the change is due to human activities and how much is natural based on the excellent models that will have been developed by that time.

That would be interesting. If he did that, he would really have done his research. As the physicists say, he may have learned some paleoclimatology and environmental science rather than about paleoclimatology and environmental science.

The Junk science website is full of just that, junk science. I suggest you find better sources, there are others available.

That link describes the process of ozone creation and depletion, implying that the science behind ozone depletion was ignoring this most basic fact. Therefore implying that the bans on CFC's did nothing to effect the ozone cycles. Of course they themselves completely ignore this little scientific tidbit about CFC's and their effect on ozone.

The CFCs are so stable that only exposure to strong UV radiation breaks them down. When that happens, the CFC molecule releases atomic chlorine. One chlorine atom can destroy over 100,000 ozone molecules. The net effect is to destroy ozone faster than it is naturally created. To return to the analogy comparing ozone levels to a stream's depth, CFCs act as a siphon, removing water faster than normal and reducing the depth of the stream.

That link is a perfect example of how misinformation is spread. That site gives the average denialist just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to be a threat. This kind of politicised science is damaging to the credibility of scientists with valid skepticism, and harming the true debate that needs to be taking place.

I am not a climatologist, however I do know that the ice is melting, and scientists whom I respect and trust say GW is due at least in part to anthropogenic causes. Therefore I will do my part to reduce my impact on the planet and encourage others by example.

If Andre's law of conservation of concern is correct, I would much rather see mankind join together in an effort to make the world a cleaner healthier place to live. As opposed to the usual, which is to make war on one another.

<snip> warming in the recent past between 1980 and 1998. That's when the warming stopped, however few did notice that.

Should we expect the warming to be linear?

World temperature was slightly warmer in 2005 than in 1998. Note the warm extreme anomalies as opposed to cool extreme anomalies. If you compare them with historical extremes these two years are somewhat unique in that there are almost no cold extremes. Also note the number of +5C anomalies in the subarctic northern land temperatures.

The mean trend has not changed significantly, but it is possible we have reached a plateau and will now experience a cooling as has been suggested by Bill Gray, professor emeritus, who predicts:
"In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin to cool again."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003040068_warming05.html [Broken]

Global Temperatures
The 2005 global temperature was statistically indistinguishable from the standing record set in 1998. One data set, in use at NCDC since the late 1990s, produced a global annual temperature for 2005 that was slightly below 1998 (below left). An improved data set, which incorporates innovative algorithms that better account for factors such as changes in spatial coverage and evolving observing methods, results in 2005 being slightly warmer than 1998. (below right)

No, it's not. at least it's 2 to 1. Hansen thinks that's warmer http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt [Broken].
According to http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/crutem3gl.txt [Broken], 2005 global temps were 0.691 above his average while 1998 was 0.828.
But the best referee would be http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2 [Broken], without coverage problems and urban heat island effects. So the average for 1998 here is 0.50025 while 2005 only gets to 0.31225. Please do check the calculation.

I'll have to make time to see this film. The best this sort of hype can do is reduce dependency on oil and promote an awareness of the global environment. In my opinion whatever changes are taking place are diffucult to reverse. Like trying to correct orbital precession or something just as enormous.

The worst a film like that can do is freak out a bunch of kids and adults. If kids aren't being alarmed about "global warming" and its implications, real or imagined, there have been lots of wars, diseases, bombs and empty causes to choose from recently.

Reminder: Folks, this thread is created in a science sub-forum. Let's keep the discussion strictly scientific. Any socio-political aspects of the discussion may be had in P&WA under the AGW thread there.

Reminder: Folks, this thread is created in a science sub-forum. Let's keep the discussion strictly scientific. Any socio-political aspects of the discussion may be had in P&WA under the AGW thread there.

Right, coming to think of that, there are a lot of ad hominems here:

Skyhunter said:

The Junk science website is full of just that, junk science. I suggest you find better sources, there are others available.

We should not be shooting the messengers

That link is a perfect example of how misinformation is spread.

Is it misinformation or the moving-the-goal-poles fallacy? accepting anything that comes from the own den and rejecting anything that is not. Wouldn't it be better just to check the sources and the logic and shut up when those happen to prove to be correct?

That site gives the average denialist just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to be a threat. This kind of politicised science is damaging to the credibility of scientists with valid skepticism, and harming the true debate that needs to be taking place.

Please indicate what is policy and what is merely stating facts?

I am not a climatologist, however I do know that the ice is melting,

Yes, some ice does, other ice don't, but what is the point? that -on the average- the world is a tad warmer than last century? But what does it proof? Does it proof that CO2 did it or the sun? Or the oceanic/atmospheric cycles?

and scientists whom I respect and trust say GW is due at least in part to anthropogenic causes.

There are several scientists and others whom I respect and trust since I checked what they were saying, who say that the previous (1980-1998) GW is most likely mainly due to natural causes as well as urban heat island contamination of sources.

ArthurDent writes
"For quite a while global warming has been presented in the public forum as a universally accepted scientific reality. However, in the light of Al Gore's new film An Inconvenient Truth many climate experts are stepping forward and pointing out that there is no conclusive evidence to support global warming as a phenomenon, much less any particular cause of it."

You know, I must say, ever since frequenting this forum more often, I've realized that I had totally accepted Global Warming as a truth at one point. I'm now totally in no position to judge. Good work, PF!!!